Roach Motel

We needed a cheap place to stay at the last minute because of an impending ice storm last month, so booked a motel room on the low end of the scale. We're still averse to unnecessary COVID exposure, so we planned to have as little time as possible in a foreign room, eating dinner and showering at home before departing for the motel. I also prepared an on-the-road breakfast so we wouldn’t have any additional, non-essential interactions with people at a diner or restaurant in the morning.

During our 2 hour journey, concentrating as I was on the driving, I wasn’t aware of how full my bladder was, and that I could have used a toilet break. As soon as I began clambering out of the car at our destination, I realized that I was absolutely desperate. Every movement, every step, just in separating my legs, seemed to threaten the floodgates! We didn't see any signs of an office, so we set off to find it to do our check in before unloading the car (and compromising my bladder further). It just so happened that the direction we started off in was the longest possible way round. I stumble-walked and shuffled so as not to lose control of my bladder. We ended up walking almost the entire perimeter of the building before finding the office. Once there, I started checking in, but about half-way through our transaction, I blurted out, “is there a Ladies Room here? I’ve been driving for 2 hours and I’m desperate!”

“Well, there isn’t a public one, but you can use my office one if you like!” she said, lifting the hinged countertop.

O, joy! What a relief, though my germaphobe tendencies during COVID made me balk at this intrusion into someone else’s private space. I had to do it. There was just no more waiting. Phew! I was relieved, and my son completed the checking in process while I was indisposed.

It was on our return to the car, that we realized that the large shipping container next to which we'd parked, was obscuring the posted signs and arrows indicating the direction to the office. Hindsight!

It was about 10:30pm by this time, so bedtime was looming, but the water in the toilet tank continued running after we’d flushed it, so we both made attempts to rectify the situation before settling into bed. We did succeed eventually, having got the hang of tweaking just the right spot in the tank. 

But by this point, we had become more acquainted with our room, and we were finding dead and dying roaches at various places on the floor on our forays into the bathroom to stop the toilet flushing. Ughhhhh. We even saw one running off along the baseboard - great! Most of our food was put away in the fridge, but we decided to put our cereal containers into the freezer overnight instead of leaving them out on the counter. I was keeping my fingers crossed that roaches were all we would encounter overnight, and they were, though my dreams were filled with things biting me! We couldn't wait to be out of there.

   

On our way to check out in the morning, we passed a man standing in the open door of one of the rooms, smoking a roach ...